A handful of Chinese rare earth suppliers have stopped shipping to American customers since early August. No export ban was announced and no licence was formally revoked. The suppliers simply declined the business, out of concern that filling those orders would put them on the wrong side of Beijing. The trigger was China’s decision in early August to sanction the Responsible Business Alliance, the American body behind a widely used supply chain auditing framework.

Chokepoint leverage looks permanent right up to the moment it isn’t. That’s the pattern across a century of resource coercion, and it applies to China’s position in rare earth processing exactly as it applied to everyone who held a similar position before. The mechanics are consistent. A state controls a stage of production that everyone needs and nobody can replace quickly. It uses that control, either openly or through licensing friction.

Beijing moved on four fronts on Wednesday and only one of them made the headlines. Exports of drones, their key components and related technologies now face case-by-case scrutiny when the destination is the United States, effective immediately, with no access to the licence facilitation measures that normally speed shipments through. Six American entities went onto the countermeasures list. A seventh was added under a separate justification. An investigation opened into imported office equipment running foreign system software.

I think the security case about foreign-made connected devices is real. A camera-equipped, always-on machine that maps the interior of a home and phones a server abroad is a genuine collection platform, and the people who spent a decade warning about this were not being paranoid. I’ve written that a network of them inside government buildings would be an intelligence problem worth acting on. So I should be the natural audience for the FCC’s new rule.

Iran has proposed amendments to a draft resolution on dark shipping that is due to be discussed at the upcoming meeting of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Assembly. The proposed amendments would strip out all mention of illicit operations, dark fleets, and maritime fraud, and would instead only refer to “substandard ship-to-ship transfers.” Iran relies on a so-called “dark fleet” of tankers that operate outside of mainstream tanker markets because of US sanctions.